Uk politics

If anyone had any doubts about just how personal the 2012 London mayoral campaign is going to be, they should have been dispelled by Ken Livingstone’s speech to Labour conference today. Ken claimed that the Mayor had ‘got what he wished for’ in above average unemployment and accused him of standing for a ‘privileged minority’. He then went on to draw an equivalence between Boris’s student antics and those of the rioters: “What is the difference between the rioters, and a gang of over-privileged arrogant students vandalising restaurants and throwing chairs through windows in Oxford? Come on Boris – what’s the moral difference between your Bullingdon vandalism as a student and the criminality of the rioters?

The Labour conference has started badly for Ed Miliband, with David Blunkett criticising the party for allowing the Tories to define the national economic debate. Blunkett was concurring with shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander’s view that the Tories had been successful in “framing a public language that made more sense of the economic crisis”. To be fair to Miliband, he made the same point in his recent interview with the New Statesman, but he is yet to provide a coherent or credible alternative to the government’s policies. So, inquiring eyes turn on Ed Balls (and today’s Mail relates another alleged tale of his part in our economic downfall). The shadow chancellor has written an article on economic policy for the Guardian.

There is a strange pre-Lehman feeling in the air right now: the idea that something awful is going to happen, but no one knows what or when. This is laden with political ramifications. The problem for the Tories last time was not that George Osborne had been caught aboard HMS Deripaska. The greater problem was that a crash had arrived and the Shadow Chancellor had nothing to say. Brown, at least, seemed to have an agenda, and the Tory poll lead was reduced to one vulnerable point. I admire Osborne, but he can do far better in making the case for the government’s economic strategy. If there is a second crash, he’ll need all his skills to convey confidence – to sound as if he knows what he’s talking about.

                                      In July 1990, Nicholas Ridley told Dominic Lawson that monetary union was "all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe". He was immediately forced to resign from the Cabinet. In this week's magazine, which hits newsstands today, Lawson says that Nicholas Ridley was right (subscribers click here). Here, in full, is the article that ended his career: Saying the unsayable about the Germans, Dominic Lawson, 14 July 1990 It is said, or it ought to have been said, that every Conservative Cabinet minister dreams of dictating a leader to the Daily Telegraph.

As the Liberal Democrat leadership leaves Birmingham, it is a contented bunch. Their conference has gone as well as could be expected. There were no embarrassing defeats for the leadership and no gaffes by any of their ministers. But conference was yet another reminder of how much of a gap there is between where those around Clegg want to take the party and where the activist base wants to go. When I asked one of Clegg’s allies about this discrepancy, he told me that the important thing to remember was that the membership, who elect the leader, take a different view from the activists. As evidence of this, he cited how activists’ darling Simon Hughes actually came third in the 2006 leadership race and how Clegg managed to squeak past Huhne in 2007.